Promotional products merchants often allow customers to provide or select artwork with which to decorate the blank goods underlying the promotional products. The artwork can include nationally famous trademarks, service marks, company and organizations names, etc. Other types of artwork include thematic materials such as regional and local identifiers (e.g., “Austin, Tex.”), logos, symbols, and the like. Some of the artwork may be appropriate to selected groups of customers or salespeople within the merchant. For instance, the city name “Austin” might be appropriate to use for customers in the central Texas area. In some cases, only select customers or sales people might be allowed use of a piece of particular artwork. For example, if a customer develops its own artwork, the customer may want only the sales person who “owns” their account to use that artwork.
In many organizations, sharing information tends to increase efficiency. For instance, within a promotional products merchant, many sales persons may want access to a variety of artwork files. Commonly sought artwork files can include slogans, graphics, commonly used terms or sayings, etc. Moreover, many sales people work collaboratively sharing ideas and improving upon those which they learn of through collaboration. For example, one sales person might alter and improve a graphical design created by another sales person (or customer).
Another consideration which complicates the situation is that sales personnel tend to be non-technical in nature. Thus, sophisticated file sharing algorithms that might be satisfactory in some applications may distract the sales team from their core competency: helping customers and efficiently identifying and ordering products desired by the customers.